Human speech may have a universal transmission rate: 39 bits per second
Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information, according to a new study. Indeed, no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.
"This is pretty solid stuff," says Bart de Boer, an evolutionary linguist who studies speech production at the Free University of Brussels, but was not involved in the work. Language lovers have long suspected that information-heavy languages—those that pack more information about tense, gender, and speaker into smaller units, for example—move slowly to make up for their density of information, he says, whereas information-light languages such as Italian can gallop along at a much faster pace. But until now, no one had the data to prove it.
Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.
From the Abstract:
"Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages' structural properties and their speakers' neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture."
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday September 06 2019, @05:47PM (5 children)
Nope, just different syllables and rates, but still ~39 bits per second...if the article is right.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 06 2019, @06:15PM (3 children)
So, the three syllables " D R D " do not communicate more efficiently than "the Department of Redundancy Department"?
The real question is: what is information? When you say: e equals m c squared, that can be shorthand for a tremendous volume of well known proofs, implications, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday September 06 2019, @06:23PM (2 children)
That's my point. How much (pre-shared) information is "referenced" as I spout off the following acronyms or jargon:
AOC
SLS
SJW
MECO
RegEx
Variac
Boot
Compander
Log-log plot
Joule
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 06 2019, @06:26PM (1 child)
Link shorteners...
Also: Shaka, when the walls fell:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the-walls-fell/372107/ [theatlantic.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday September 06 2019, @06:36PM
That's a great example.
Human ingenuity improving spoken communication efficiency when both parties are assumed to have a shared knowledge base.
Also consider this example, I think from an early BYTE magazine article on general AI:
P1: Hungry?
P2: How about McDonalds?
P1: Where are my keys?
P2: On the dresser
A lot was communicated in few words.
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 06 2019, @06:15PM
In such conversations, the speech didn't seem to slow down as jargon laden sentences were spoken.
I would have to think this optimization (or compression?) gets some increase in information density?
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.